'Black' Strangers in the White Rose County: Pakistanis, Irish, and the Shaping of Multiethnic West Yorkshire, 1845-1985.

This comparative history analyzes the evolution in national identity that naturally accompanied the transition from British Empire to British Commonwealth in the mid-twentieth century, while concurrently taking an ethnically and geographically-specialized approach to immigrants in Britain. The Pakistanis and Irish have been chosen for the way race, religion, and class were used within their immig... read morerant communities and among the white public to create social and cultural barriers in northern industrial cities, and how Empire-based British views towards these subjects carried over to interactions in the mother country. West Yorkshire has been chosen not only for its history of immigration, but also for the notable conflicts that it witnessed from the arrival of the Famine Irish in the 1840s to the radicalization of British Muslims in the 1980s. Are parallels between the Pakistanis and Irish usefully only in instructing our perceptions of British attitudes towards black immigrants, or do the two groups' shared experiences and moments of cultural contact say something more profound about immigrant lives in Great Britain? read less